Lord Mandelson may insist, smooth as ever, that the government is one strong, happy team, working away together, faces turned towards a brighter future. But the stories of private dismay just keep coming. And the root of the problem may be not the economic crisis but the prime minister's style of doing politics.

There are two key people who, under endless pressure from journalists, keep refusing to diss Brown, despite provocation. They are Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, and the chancellor, Alistair Darling. Both were long-term Brown supporters and counted him as a genuine friend. Both are getting a horrible kicking in the papers, with endless hostile briefings, said to be coming from those around the prime minister. Why? What's that supposed to achieve?

Harman's remarkable assertion that Sir Fred Goodwin would, one way or another, not keep his £700,000 a year pension because "the court of public opinion" would not allow it was not her finest hour. But it was not said without prior thought. There was indeed a plan which had been discussed in cabinet for some form of clawback levy on the pensions of ex-tycoons whose companies had come a terrible cropper on their watch. It was being compared to the windfall levy on the utilities. She jumped the gun, but Harman was not conjuring a soundbite out of nothing.

For this, however, she was ripped into by anonymous Labour briefers. It was all about her attempt to position herself to take over from Brown, and so on. Guffaws all round about her having the temerity. But if this was really so, she would be organising frantically. Somebody would have been doing some anti-Brown briefing on her behalf. It isn't happening.

She seems to be fighting her cause in cabinet, taking a more anti-City line than some other ministers, and refusing to have her equalities legislation nudged aside by Mandelson, though again she is infuriatingly straightforward about not discussing these things. Under great personal attack, she's got her head down and is plugging on regardless. You don't have to regard her as some kind of political titan to think this is cause for mild praise rather than contempt.

A more interesting case may be Alistair Darling - more interesting because he has been closer to Brown for longer. Barely a day goes by without him picking up a paper to read that he's about to be sacked. Remember the hysterical froth when he gave this paper an interview last autumn saying we faced the worst economic crisis for 60 years and a severe downturn? Right on both counts, it turns out, but back then there was much gossip about the tumbril rolling his way.

Since then he's kept his nerve and struggled to keep the banking system alive. The amount of our money poured into these sickly behemoths is terrifying, yet lending is still a trickle. On the other hand, what alternatives did he have? He has kept his nerve and even his sense of humour, despite the fact No 10 is widely thought to have cold-shouldered him and there is suspicion inside the Treasury that he is being set up as the next fall guy.

His latest "crime" is his admission in a Telegraph interview that mistakes were made in banking regulation. The key words bear repeating: "There are a lot of lessons to be learnt by regulators, governments, all of us ... a culture was allowed to develop over the last 15 years or so where the relationship between what people did and what they got went way out of alignment, especially at the top end. If there is a fault, it is our collective responsibility. All of us have to have the humility to accept that over the last few years, things got out of alignment."

Well, hello? What in that isn't self-evident? Nobody looking back over that glitzy, banker-dominated boom could deny that a rotten culture blossomed and that everybody, certainly including ministers, needs to share the blame. It's as obvious as the fact that the sun rises in the east. It should have been an unremarkable remark, not a thought crime.

I still scratch my head at how Gordon Brown, who can be such a cerebral, serious-minded man, finds himself determined not to state the obvious - so that his doggedly loyal chancellor seems like a rebel for doing so. I do accept that this business of trying to get Brown to apologise has become a somewhat tedious game - he's clearly not going to, and we have to move on. But there is more to this than semantics.

Unless people feel politicians, like the rest of the world, have been shocked into rethinking their assumptions, how can they feel confidence in future decisions? This is not about weakness. You can't base a new politics on denial.

Even the Tories are beginning to get there. George Osborne has described a bank-led and borrowers' boom during which "almost everyone was persuaded" - so, Tories too - adding, "we forgot that an economy built on debt is not an economy built to last". The "we" was interesting. The Tories, with all their hedge-fund chums and banking backers, are still far too smug in their finger pointing, but even their language is now altering. Labour, take note.

The root problem seems to be that Brown sees politics as being about defining your enemies, then defining yourself against them, and then attacking. It's constant positioning. So he can't admit the obvious - that on his watch, regulation was insufficient, because that would "be a gift to the Tories". Whereas in fact, if he was able to admit that he had been too credulous about the banks but had learned some painful lessons, he would actually now be in a stronger position, far better able to get a hearing.

If he was able to see Harman and Darling as loyal people with minds of their own, rather than as potential renegades who need to be slapped down, then he would also be in a better place, and his administration would seem more coherent. Why pick fights with friends?

The mood of the country has changed, anyway. People want something different in truly dangerous, recessionary times. They want politicians to be less tribal, franker and more open about what went wrong. It's a time for rallying round, not for finding new divisions. It's not quite true that everyone failed to see the expanding golden bubble for what it was. A few did. But millions were mesmerised and the consequences are going to be horrible. At this hard moment, there is no place for false pride. We are in it together. The prime minister must be less proud. He has, frankly, less to be proud about.